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Fees and FAQ

Answers to Your Questions Are Right Here

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FAQs

What happens in the first session?

Many people arrive at their first session with some version of the same question floating around in their minds:

“Um…what exactly is this going to be like?”

That’s completely normal.

Many of the people I work with are thoughtful, capable adults who grew up being the responsible one in their families. Therapy can feel unfamiliar when you’re used to being the person who figures things out on your own.

I spent several years working at an employee assistance program where more than half the people I saw were trying therapy for the first time, so I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who felt a little unsure about what they were getting themselves into.

The first session is mostly about getting oriented.

We’ll talk about what’s bringing you in, what’s been happening in your life recently, and what you’re hoping might change. I’ll ask some questions so I can understand the broader context of your life and the patterns you’ve been dealing with.

You don’t need to prepare anything in advance. Just show up as you are.

How the work tends to unfold

Over time, our work together often follows a loose arc — more of a framework than a formula:

Recognizing
Understanding what’s happening in your life and the deeper patterns underneath it.

Resourcing
Building the emotional stability and support you need before we start exploring more deeply.

Updating
Using approaches like parts work, clinical hypnosis, and memory reconsolidation to help shift emotional patterns that formed earlier in life.

Integrating
Practicing new ways of relating to yourself and others until they begin to feel natural rather than effortful.

We won’t march through these steps in order. Real life doesn’t work that way. Think of it more as a map we refer back to as we go.

What sessions are usually like

Most sessions are conversational, reflective, and collaborative.

At the start of a session we’ll usually take a minute to decide what feels most important to focus on that day. Sometimes we’ll explore something that’s been happening recently. Other times we’ll slow down and look more closely at an emotional pattern that’s been around for a long time.

I often bring tools, exercises, or perspectives into the conversation when they seem useful.

And sometimes we simply follow where the conversation naturally leads. After working with many hundreds of people over the years, I’ve learned that if we stay curious and attentive, the important threads tend to surface.

Occasionally the process feels smooth and insightful. Occasionally we wander into an eddy for a while.

Both are part of the work.

And we’ll find our way through it together.

How is your approach different from traditional talk therapy?

Many forms of therapy focus primarily on helping people manage symptoms - learning coping skills, reframing thoughts, or building healthier habits.

Those things can absolutely be useful. But many people discover that even after gaining insight or learning good strategies, certain patterns stubbornly remain.

You might understand why you overthink, why you feel responsible for everyone, or why you struggle to rest - and yet the pattern still shows up.

The approaches I use are designed to work a little deeper than that.

My work draws heavily from Coherence Therapy and the neuroscience of memory reconsolidation, which focus on how emotional learnings form in the brain and how they can actually update. Rather than trying to override or control a pattern, we explore the emotional logic behind it - the way it once made sense in your life.

When that underlying emotional learning becomes visible and fully understood, the mind often reorganizes in surprising ways.

I also incorporate parts work, which helps us understand the different internal voices or drives that shape your experience, and clinical hypnosis, which can help access layers of the mind that are harder to reach through conversation alone.

In practice, this means our work is less about trying to “fix” you and more about helping your mind reconfigure patterns that were formed earlier in life.

The result is often not just better coping, but a genuine shift in how certain situations feel from the inside.